Who: Wash and Kyu What: Love confession Where: Kyu’s apartment When: Evening of October 7th, 2015 Warnings/Rating Low to medium - Potential Trigger Warning: minor drug use; language and Kyu's Fruity Pebbles duvet (contains links) Status: Complete when posted
The sun had set by the time Wash had gotten back to civilization again. He made it back to his apartment to drop off the duffle bag and trade his sneakers for his boots. Having them on his feet again just felt better.
he didn’t stay at his apartment for very long, literally in and out and back out on the streets. He texted Kyu to make sure she was at home and not at class or the tattoo shop before heading directly there. One stop to get a bouquet of flowers, a meager apology for pushing her away the last several days and for being over all stupid.
All the fear and doubt that had held him back was gone now. All that was left was a need to see Kyu, to hear her voice, to hold her close. If everything that had happened since Saturday morning had told him anything it was that he couldn’t risk not telling her how he felt. Tomorrow might be too late. Tomorrow might never come.
He knocked on her door.
Kyu had been sketching on her couch when Wash texted her. Clad in a comfy pair of boxers and an oversized t-shirt from the last EDM festival she’d gone to, she wiggled her toes and continued to draw. Wash was coming over, and it made her heart beat faster. She knew she loved the guy, so it had turned into a game of hoping she didn’t blurt out the sentiment before he did. Guys seemed to hate it in movies and stuff when girls said they loved them. It made no sense to her, but what did she know? She’d never been in love before.
When she heard someone knock at the door she hopped up and fluttered over. Kyu opened the door tentatively if only because she didn’t want the UPS guy to see she had wings. When she saw it was wash, Kyu flung the door open wide and giggled when she saw flowers. “For me? I’ve never gotten flowers before.”
Wash smiled for the first time in days. She could always make him smile. “Yeah, for you,” he said as he gave them to her. “Kyu, I...” he trailed off, the smile falling from his face leaving it to look tired and worn with the pent up emotions he’d been doing so well to try and avoid up to this point. They threatened to surge forward and it was all Wash could do to keep them in check.
He reached for her, taking her face in his hands and kissed her deeply. It wasn’t a lustful kiss full of heat and desire, but one of deep passion that was desperate to be shared with the woman he cared about. When he let go his grey eyes met hers. His hands fell to her shoulders. “Kyu, I’m sorry I haven’t been here for you the past few days. Gale’s death…” the word caught awkwardly in his throat. “It’s made me do a lot of thinking. What’s here today...could be gone tomorrow…” He pulled her close. “I love you.”
Kyu closed her eyes to sniff the flowers, smiling when they smelled how she’d always thought flowers would smell. (Better than perfume, much lighter.) She’d been about to reply to him when he kissed her the way girls in movies got kissed. It had always struck her as hyperbolic when people said their knees got weak during kisses, but Kyu was starting to understand. Kyu was more familiar with the physical parts of love, something that was made more understandable by being a love fairy in her dreams, but she was starting to understand that physical acts with emotions behind them? Were even better.
Snuggling close into him, Kyu closed her eyes. He’d just said what she’d wanted to say, and she smiled. “I love you too, Wash. I’ve wanted to say it for a while, but I didn’t wanna freak you out. I’m just sorry all this shit had to go down for us to use our words.” She motioned for him to come inside, so they weren’t snogging more in the hallway. Gossipy neighbors.
She didn’t run. She hadn’t laughed at him. She’d wanted to say it herself. And...she loved him too. Hearing her say that meant the world to him. He wanted to stand there with her in his arms and allow himself to live in the moment for once. But he let her take him into her apartment and away from the eyes of nosy neighbors. They needed their privacy.
“I’m sorry too,” he told her. “I’m sorry it took me so long and that it took a tragedy for me to wake the fuck up.” He swallowed hard. Despite what Gale may have thought, Wash still struggled with his emotions. “I’m really sorry I pushed you away. I needed some space to sort out my head…” sort out everything with his head. Gale’s death, his own Dreams and the neural implants all coming together at once for a perfect storm of shit. He was going to have to tell her about the dreams. About the implants. “I was drinking and...well...pretty much a mess. How are you? Are you doing ok?”
“You told me where you were going, that’s not pushing me away. Everyone needs time to sort their heads out, or sometimes you just wanna be alone, you know?” Kyu understood the need for alone time; her parents had been super big on always being around each other, and sometimes Kyu just wanted to lock herself in her room and get away. It was nice to be alone sometimes, but this was a shitty reason to be alone. People dying hurt. “As long as you tell me where you’re going, I’m fine, I really am. Don’t worry about me. I’m sad about Gale, but you two were closer. How’re you holding up?” Kyu worried about Wash pretty much all the time. It was such bullshit that such an amazing, sweet person got the most fucked up dreams ever.
The last thing Wash wanted to do was lie to her. Especially now. But he couldn’t tell her that he knew where Gale was and why he was there. Shit, if Kyu never found out the why, Wash would breathe easier. She didn’t need to be involved in any of that, even on the peripherie.
“I’m doing better now,” he said. “People I know have died before. It’s just...different...when it happens here. At home. We’re supposed to be safe here. And Gale. He was a soldier too. To go out like that…” Wash let out a breath and ran his hands through his hair. His fingers catching on the port just below his hairline. “I was trying to not think about it, I guess. But that’s no good. Like I said, I was pretty much a mess. On top of that my Dreams haven’t let up. Got a brand new gift.” He glanced at her. Saw her wings were out and smiled faintly. Maybe it was her wings, or the fact that she was dressed so casual, or maybe just because she was close, but he wanted to hold her again. Hold her and forget, even for a few fleeting minutes, all of the shit that was happening.
“What happened? If you don’t want to talk about it, that’s cool too. We’ll get you food, and just not think about things if that’s what you want.” Sometimes she knew not talking about stuff was just as big a part of the healing process as talking about it was. People processed stuff in different ways, and it was important to Kyu that she work with Wash in a way that benefited him. He was her boyfriend, they were in love, and she wanted to help him.
“Neural implants,” he told her. “Just woke up last Saturday and had them. Gave me a fucking killer of a headache.” He patted the back of his neck “and the port to go with it.”
Between that, what happened to Gale and the latest round of Dreams of torturing the Alpha, Wash was pretty much done with the week. Done talking about it. Done thinking about it. Just done.
He pulled her close again and wrapped his arms around her being mindful of her wings. It may have sounded a little strange, but he felt safe here with her. His body - a tightly wound up ball of anxious energy and emotions he’d been struggling hard to keep in check - was finally starting to relax. “Do you mind if I stay here tonight?” He asked.
“Oh my fucking god, are you shitting me?” Kyu looked up at him. “Of course you’re staying here with me. If you wanna, you can have a pot brownie, but I’m absolutely going to give you a massage and we’ll just chill and watch movies and eat food and just ... not think about all of the bullshit that is your life right now.” Not for the first time, Kyu wished that she could take on some of Wash’s bullshit dreams. “Fuck, the dream where my client fucked the one-year-old catgirl is way less weird when compared with all your crap.”
“Your client fucked a one-year-old cat girl?” Wash blinked at her. Out of all the weird ass things he’d heard recently, that was near the top. “Wh-why would he do that? Why would he want to do that?”
Weird and possibly illegal cat-girl fetishes aside, a night in with food and a massage sounded like a dream come true. He’d done nothing but work as much as possible for the past several days, both at the Ranch and at Navi’s added to his most recent trek up the mountain and his body was tired and ached. His evenings spent at the bar trying to numb himself as much as possible with alcohol hadn’t helped much either. A massage sounded like the best idea ever.
Wash felt a sudden pang of guilt. He was with the woman he loved, being pampered and fussed over while Gale was alone and Leliana was out doing God only knew what. It wasn’t fair.
Life isn’t fair. The sooner you learn that, the better.
Wash took a deep breath. Kyu had said something about pot brownies, hadn’t she?
“You have pot brownies?” He asked. “I’ve never had one before.” He’d smoked pot all of once in his life and it had made him cough and gag, but anything that would help him relax would be good about now.
“A year old in cat years. And fuck me, I have no idea why he was randomly into bestiality, but whatever gross thing he was into.” Kyu shrugged. Walking into the kitchen, she moved to reheat one of the pot brownies she’d been talking about. “They’re actually really good. Some pot brownies taste like pot, but these are actually good brownies on top of giving me super mellow.” Kyu knew that Wash wasn’t super experienced with drugs that weren’t prescription, so it’d help that she was around.
When the microwave beeped, she moved the brownie to a plate and passed it over. A glass of milk, and he was all set. “What kinda movie are you feeling?”
Being a year old in cat years didn’t make it any less weird. If anything that made it even weirder.
The couch was beckoning, so while Kyu warmed up the brownie, Wash had a seat. God it felt good to sit down. Kyu’s couch had to have been the most comfortable couch in the world at that moment and Wash found himself sitting pretty deeply in it and trying to will the muscles in the small of his back and his shoulders to fucking relax a little, for crying out loud!
He took the brownie and glass of milk from Kyu. Having never had a pot brownie before, Wash wasn’t sure what to expect from this experience. The brownie on the plate looked pretty normal. A familiar and inviting brown color and it smelled pretty good. If Kyu hadn’t straight up told him there was pot in this, he wouldn’t have known.
Wash set the glass of milk down before picking up the brownie and taking the first tentative bite. To his surprise it was good. Better than good. It was delicious. Warm, moist and chocolaty, as any good brownie should be, with a hint of something else that was unidentifiable, which Wash assumed to be the pot element. His next bite was no where near as tentative.
“Movie…” he repeated a little thoughtfully as he chewed. “I don’t really know…something that doesn’t require me to think.”
“Hmm. Michael Bay. Maybe the first Transformers movie? I had a crush on Bumblebee as a kid, seriously. Then again, explosions.” She tapped her fingers to her lips in thought. “I know! Comedy. Anchorman. You in?” Her first thought had been Zoolander, but that had brainwashing in it which was a no-no. Anchorman was a safe bet at any time.
She curled up behind him, tugging his shirt off so she could rub his back. “So, when that kicks in, you’ll probably not notice it right away. It just sorta happens that one moment you’re not stoned, the next you are. You might get mellow, or you might get giggly. Some people get paranoid, which sucks, but if that happens I’ve got Xanax, so we should be all right.” Kyu wasn’t so much a drug addict as she was a dealer. In her personal life, she tended to just be her own pharmacy. Doctors were for people who couldn’t just get their own meds.
Wash didn’t have a problem with explosions he could see and knew were coming. It was the ones that surprised him that were the problem. That being said, the balls-to-the-wall shoot’em up race that was Transformers was probably not a good choice given the week he’d had. Anchorman sounded like a better choice. “Yeah, I’m in.”
Wash shifted on the couch as Kyu wriggled onto the couch behind him. Next thing he knew, his shirt was pulled off over his head. On the back of his neck just below his hairline was a round port that looked similar to a port in a computer.
The lesson on pot and its effects was very sweet. He couldn’t help smiling. “A couple of friends of mine in high school smoked every now and then,” he told her. “They were the stereotypical skater types. I think they probably were probably more interested in the lifestyle than the actual skating part. They let me hit off a pipe once. I couldn’t stop coughing for like five minutes.”
Kyu looked at the port but didn’t comment; she was pretty sure he wouldn’t want to talk about it anyway. Fiddling with the remote, she pulled up Netflix and started up Anchorman. It was one of her favorites, and she could quote the whole thing from memory.
Her hands ran over his back before she started to actually rub, trying to gauge where his tense spots were. “This is actually a strain that’s supposed to help with anxiety. I keep it on hand for friends or for the night before an exam or just whenever I get really messed up over something.” She kissed his back and wrapped her legs around his waist from behind.
Wash was glad Kyu didn’t mention the port in his neck. He knew eventually they’d have a talk about their dreams, how they effected their lives in Orange County, but for the moment he wanted to forget they were there.
Goosebumps ran down his arms and legs when Kyu started on his back. Not the kind he got when he was anxious or his guard went up which tended to happen when someone touched him from behind, but the kind one could get when a ticklish spot on their body was triggered. After a moment they were gone and he had settled in to let her rub out the knots in his shoulders and lower back.
He rested his hands on her legs, gently caressing her calves. “Can they do that,” he asked and glanced back towards her. “Grow a specific kind of weed to take care of anxiety?”
“You’re so stressed out,” she murmured as she soothed out a knot. Kyu was careful not to be too aggressive with her manipulations, not wanting to hurt him instead of help. She’d thought about being a massage therapist in her teens, and had read a lot of books on it. That, plus being a love fairy and knowing how people liked to be touched helped her work out the kinks in his back.
HIs question made her smile. “Oh, yeah. There’s lots of science behind weed. I mean, sure, there’s your standard stoner culture that just wants to get stupid and watch Harold and Kumar, but lots of people take it for their health. It helps with nausea from chemo, migraines, girls who have period cramps so bad they have to take Vicodin, shit like that.” She was actually proud of how smart some people working in the weed industry could be.
Legalization of pot had been in the news for years and Wash would have had to have lived under a rock to not have heard any of it. It had all started with medicinal dispensaries. He’d read somewhere that marijuana was good for glaucoma patients, but that was as far as his knowledge on the subject really went. Up until now he sort of figured it was a one size fit all kind of deal. But the more he thought about it, the more it made sense. It was a plant after all. If they could make different kinds of oranges and apples, then sure as hell they could make different kinds of pot.
Kyu was smart, though. She was very knowledgable on the subject. She had clearly done her research, which was impressive. Wash didn’t know very many people who smoked who bothered. But she was pretty amazing that way.
They way she listed off all the good things pot could do reminded Wash of what she’d said about her parents and how they knew all the uses for hemp. And then he was thinking of hemp butter, which quickly lead to soylent and that weird ass commercial about the guy on the beach who apparently had built a house and a working radio...and now he was laughing.
She nibbled his shoulder. “What’re you laughing at, Chuckles?” Stopping wrapping her massage, she wrapped her arms around him.
“I was just thinking,” he laughed, rubbing her bare legs. “About that commercial? The one with with the guy who drank the soylent and built a house. Its pretty fucking ridiculous.”
He leaned back a little, not enough to squish her, but enough to reach back to caress her hair. “That was nice, thank you.”
“I’ve got some in the fridge if you wanna try it,” she teased. Leaning forward, she turned her head so she could kiss him. With anyone else it would’ve felt awkward, but with Wash, it was fun. “We don’t really hang out at my place that much, I should give you the grand tour.” It wasn’t a huge place - though her parents had bought her a two bedroom apartment in a trendy part of Irvine - but it was obviously hers. Splashes of bright color everywhere, glitter, and pop art on every wall just kinda spelled out Kyu.
Wash returned the kiss with a faint smile. The pot brownie must have been doing its job. Wash didn’t feel necessarily good - it would be some time yet before he could honestly say he felt good. But he felt better, or what he would define as better. Not feeling as though he were loosing his grip on everything he had worked so hard to achieve the last several months. Kyu had a lot to do with that. Not just for giving him the pot brownie, but just being there with him, caring about him.
He liked her apartment. She had made it her home. It was comfortable and just gave off a happy vibe with its rich bright colors. “Yeah,” he said, turning his eyes back towards his girlfriend. “Show me around.”
“Well, this is the living room. I’ve got a PS4 and I just use that for BluRays and stuff. No cable, but I’ve got Netflix and Hulu, so if you can’t sleep or something tonight, feel free to fire that up.” She took his hand and showed him a linen closet off to the side filled with snuggly throw blankets and pillows. “In case you get cold.”
Moving into the kitchen, she gestured to the well stocked pantry and fridge. She didn’t have to eat anymore, but she loved to, and as such she had one meal a day and a couple of snacks just because food was fucking awesome. “Help yourself to anything. I’ve got soda and beer and milk, and there’s a bottle of vodka in the freezer.” Kyu didn’t let go of his hand as she showed him to the hallway. “So, there’s the guest room.” It was painted a dark blue and had a futon against one wall. Against the other was a desk and an easel. “I kinda use it as a study too.”
Across the way was her bathroom. She had a shower curtain that had cats shooting laser beams and bright pink throw rugs. “There’s loads of shampoo and soap and stuff, just use what you need. There should be some unopened tooth brushes under the sink, I buy those in bulk.”
Her bedroom was all bright colors and sparkly things - throw pillows that glittered, a hot pink vanity, and a duvet cover that had Fruity Pebbles on it. “Sorry if it’s too girlie girl for you, but hey, that’s how I roll.”
Wash followed along, hand-in-hand with Kyu as she showed him around her apartment. The shower curtain with its floating cat heads with laser beam eyes made him laugh with its sheer awesomeness.
Her bedroom was an amazing testament to all things sparkly and eye catching. Wash had never seen a hot pink vanity before (not that he’d seen many vanities in his day). The bedroom may have been a bit girly with its glitter and bright colors, but Wash didn’t care. This was her space, free to do with whatever she wanted and boy had she taken full advantage of that. Instead of being a place to come back to in order to sleep and stay warm, she had made the apartment her home, surrounding herself with things that reflected her personality. All the things Wash loved about her.
He put his arm around her shoulders. “Girly, maybe,” he said, “but it’s great. It’s all great. Is that really a Fruity Pebbles comforter? Where the hell did you find that? Its awesome…” and made him want to go back to the kitchen and raid her pantry.
“The internet,” Kyu laughed. “That’s where the awesome lives.” She wrapped her arms around him from the side. “I debated dying my hair like that, but now that my hair comes in pink? Why bother.” She tiptoed up to kiss his jaw. “You hungry? Munchies will kick in eventually, it’s why my pantry’s well stocked. It’s like the weed doesn’t get I’m a fairy and don’t strictly need food.”
Wash ran a hand through her hair. “You could still do it,” he told her. “A couple of blue streaks or something. And when it starts to grow back in you won’t have to worry about dying it again because it’ll still look good.” Wash believed Kyu would have looked good no matter what she decided to do. Dye her hair, more tattoos or none of it. She was beautiful.
He gave her a kiss. “Thanks for letting me stay here,” he told her softly and held her close.
“I don’t think pot cares,” he said after a moment. “I am hungry actually.” He didn’t know for what exactly. Something crunchy and salty. “I think I saw a bag of chips in the pantry. Think we can tear into that?”
“That’s true,” she smiled. “I’ll see how I feel about it. Dyed hair is such a pain in the ass to maintain.” Taking his hand, she leaned against him. “I”m just glad you’re here.”
Talking about food made her more hungry, though, and she nodded. “Oh, man, I could order us food too. Chips until then. What kinda food you want? I usually get way into tacos when I’m stoned.”
Wash understood how difficult it could be to maintain a dye job. “You know, I used to dye my hair in high school. A friend of mine was into cosmetology or something, I don’t remember. She used to do it for me. Black. She’d get after me when the blond would grow back in”
He rubbed her arm. Tacos sounded good. Then again Fruity Pebbles did as well. It may have been that he hadn’t eaten anything that day or the pot that was working its way through his system, making him relax more and more, but she could have offered him kimchi and durian fruit and he probably would have thought that sounded fantastic. “Tacos sound pretty good,” he said. “And maybe a burrito? Carne?”
She laughed. “You probably looked like an emo kid. You’re handsome blond, but it was nice of you to be her guinea pig.”
His stomach rumbles were practically audible, and Kyu rubbed over his abdomen gently. “Yeah, I’ll fire up the internet so you can look at menus while we munch.” Kyu was just glad that he was eating. Sometimes stress made people stop eating, but the pot seemed to agree with him. He seemed less stressed.
He laughed. “Yeah, I did look pretty emo. It was my idea, though, the hair dying,” he said. “I tried doing it myself once. I think I read a book once in which one of the characters dyed his hair with shoe polish? Something like that and tried it myself.” He shrugged, “I guess I wanted to change, be someone different. I don’t know. It came out pretty stupid. Thank god she was able to fix it before school. My stepfather thought it was stupid. He saw it, laughed and then smacked me. He wouldn’t let up off it after. I guess I kept it just to spite him.”
The pot was agreeing with him. He usually didn’t like talking about his childhood, of his parents (lately more so because he was starting to have problems discerning his own memories from his dream counterparts’), but he was chilled-out enough now to sort of shrug it all off. Besides, Kyu wanted food. They were going to get tacos.
“I don’t think I should look at a menu,” he told her. “I don’t know if it’s the pot or what, but I think I might eat everything on there. I can’t tell if I’m hungry or just want to eat the food for the sake of eating food. Is that normal?”
“That’s what being a teenager is all about, though. Trying stuff to figure out who you are.” She smiled at the story but then narrowed her eyes at his mentioning of her stepfather. Kyu secretly hoped the man was dead, because if she ever met him she’d probably beat the crap out of him.
But she knew that he wouldn’t want to dwell on his stepdad when they were having a nice time. “Yeah, that’s totally normal. I’ll just get a shitton of food and we can figure out what we want afterwards.” She grinned and ordered them a bunch of tacos, carne asada, burritos, tostadas, enough food for five or six people. “Okay, that’ll be here in 45. Chips until then?”
“Chips until then,” Wash nodded emphatically. His high was settling in nicely. He’d been a little concerned at first that because he was a naturally paranoid man - always needing to see an entirety of a room, locating possible ambush points, hyper awareness of the location of people around him, never letting anyone (except Kyu) at his back - the pot would increase his paranoia, and given the events of the past week, he was on higher alert than ever. It hadn’t though, at least not this time around. Unlike the stoned feeling provided by his pain and migraine meds, which was mostly numb lethargy that clouded his awareness and perception, the pot had simply mellowed him out. His body didn’t feel half as tense as it had earlier. His head didn’t feel clear, but all the worry and anxiety that had been dogging him seemed to have lifted, at least for the evening.
Pot apparently made him a little chatty as well. He had all kinds of stories about his friends from high school, his fellow skaters that had taught him how to ride a board. He talked about his time in the marines, about his unit, the hijinks they used to get into when they were stateside, what they did to alleviate the tension when they were overseas. The happy times of his life he wanted very much to relive for her.
At some point, however, the lines had started to blur between his life here, and the lives of Agent Washington, Director Leonard Church and the Alpha.
Kyu loved that Wash was feeling comfortable enough with her to talk about his life. She loved hearing about him doing skating tricks, about the goofy stuff his unit did, and she soon curled up next to him to listen. Her head was on his shoulder, and she had her arms around him when the doorbell rang. “Tacoooooooos,” she beamed.
Wash had trailed off in the middle of a story about himself and York and North. His brows were furrowed together as he tried to decipher if the memory was one of his or not. He couldn’t tell anymore.
Her arms were around his bare torso and he had one arm along her back, his fingers tracing soft lines up and down her back between her wings. He was so relaxed that when the doorbell rang, his body gave a little jerk, causing him to sit up just a bit straighter than before. His attention was immediately at the door and it was a split second before his mind quickly identified the noise as a non-threat. He relaxed again, turning a grin towards his girlfriend. “Foood!” He agreed. “I’m starving!”
Kyu went to get the door so that Wash didn’t have to get up, and she tipped the driver and returned with two huge paper bags filled with stuff that smelled awesome. She’d noticed Wash’s confusion during his story but hadn’t commented upon it; if he wanted to tell her something, he would. Besides, she imagined that war would make anyone’s memory of specifics go a little wonky.
“Grab some drinks from the fridge, I’ll get stuff on plates.” Her wings were still out, and she fluttered a few inches above the floor to reach the high shelves. Being a fairy had advantages.
The tantalizing smell of Mexican food drew Wash off the couch the moment Kyu had gotten it into the apartment. Despite having gnoshed on chips, his belly really wanted what was in those bags.
He followed her to the kitchen, practically salivating over the smell alone. He would have dived right into the bag had Kyu not given him the task of getting them drinks. “Yeah,” he said moving towards the fridge. “Whaddya want, love?”
He looked up from the fridge to see Kyu hovering a few inches off the ground to get plates for their food. His mouth pulled into a grin. He’d seen her fly before, of course, early in their relationship, but seeing someone actually fly was still amazing.
“Uh, soda for me, whatever I have the most of.” She smiled over her shoulder at him, then laughed at his doofy grin. “What’re you smiling at, gorgeous?” Sometimes he was so cute she just wanted to stare at him for a good long while. She understood the impulse.
He blinked a couple of times, having been caught in the act of staring at her hovering there, her shimmery wings fluttering on her back. “You,” he answered, that goofy grin still on his face. “Flying. I’ll probably see it a million times and never get over it.”
She had asked him to get something, hadn’t she? Soda? He pulled his eyes from her to grab whatever she had the most of in the fridge. He eyed the white bottle of soylent distrustfully before getting a bottled water for himself.
“I was talking about something earlier, wasn’t I?” He asked as he handed her her drink.
“Yeah, just a Mountain Dew or a Coke would be rad.” She was kind of a sugar addict. She also understood losing one’s place in a conversation, as pot tended to do that to her and a lot of people who used it. “You were talking about squad hijinx.”
That’s right. He’d been talking about York. About his spar with Tex and Maine and Wyoming? No, that hadn’t actually happened. But it had, happened. Wash remembered watching it with South and Carolina on the observation deck (we never had an observation deck). Tex had taken on all three of them at once and had beaten them round after round. They were covered in pink practice foam, freezing their armor in place and in some of the weirdest positions. (Armor? We had flack jackets.) No it was armor. Biomechanical armor. His was grey with yellow. (I wore desert camo in the middle east).
Wash winced and shook his head. “Sorry,” he said a little sheepishly, “I’m having trouble remembering how the story went. I can’t remember if it happened here or in my Dreams. They’ve been kind of bleeding into each other lately. We can talk about something else. I’ve been yacking about my shenanigans all night.”
“You’re so similar to Dream you, I get it.” She handed him a plate piled high with food, kissing him on the cheek. “We can talk about what movie to watch while we eat since it’s your turn to pick off of Netflix.”
“I don’t think I’m that similar,” he said. “Well, I guess I can draw parallels between myself and Agent Washington, but not so much with The Director or the Alpha.” And it was their combined memories that seemed to be giving him issues. He couldn’t really tell where one ended and the other began, including himself.
He was still trying to sort that out when he looked over at the TV. Anchorman had ended shortly before the food had arrived. He remembered it ending, but it had been like he’d blinked and the movie was over. He squinted at the TV thoughtfully. Comedy seemed to be a good way to go for the evening. He found he wanted something older, something he used to watch as a kid. “How do you feel about Mel Books?” He asked. The movies may have been a bit before Kyu’s time, but even with the pop-culture references of the time, they were still enjoyable to watch.
“Never seen him, sure!” She smiled and moved to sit down on a bean bag in front of the TV, food perched on her knees. “Dig in, dude.”